The Drawing of the Three

In August 1959, George is a medical intern assigned to a shift with emergency paramedics. He had been doing well on the emergency rotation, despite handling the carnage at mass accident sites, until the trauma of tending to severely injured people led to nightmares about his dead mother. For some time, George gave up the idea of becoming a doctor but revived and joined the “paras.” Despite his exposure, the recent subway attack on a pretty young Black woman left George unsettled. The woman was deliberately pushed onto the tracks by someone in the crowd, who then ran away. She lived, but the train ran over her legs.

The strangest part was that when George and the other intern took her to the Sisters of Mercy hospital, the woman seemed to switch personalities. One moment, she was calm, though afraid, and politely asking about her injuries. The next, she was shouting in anger, talking in an exaggerated dialect, and threatening to kill the white man who did this to her. George was relieved when the woman fainted.

When Roland enters the mind of Detta Walker, Detta senses his presence immediately. She’s outraged that someone walked into her mind. Roland feels her fury, thinking of her mind as a “snakepit of hate and revulsion” (249). Roland’s and Detta’s reactions to each other make Roland realize that Detta is used to sharing her mind with someone else. Meanwhile, Detta panics and drops the items she was shoplifting and races out of the store in her wheelchair, as if to flee from the man in her mind. Guards chase her, but after a curve in the road, Detta disappears. Roland has taken over Detta and enters the doorway. The doorway is open, indicating that Eddie didn’t kill Roland after all. Roland brings Detta to Mid-World.

Although Eddie puts his knife to Roland’s throat, he can’t bring himself to kill him immediately. He then looks at the doorway and is distracted by the scene flickering in front of him as if in a movie like The Shining. A woman enters the doorway. She ends up next to Eddie, who is holding a knife. She politely asks him what he intends to do with it. Eddie is taken aback since he’d expected her to ask where she was first. The fact that she doesn’t ask this question suggests that she’s used to ending up in strange places.

The woman has no idea how she came to the beach. Odetta tells Eddie that the last thing she remembers is watching the TV for news about her activist friends who were still being held in Oxford, Mississippi. She thinks Eddie might have abducted her from her home. Roland, now in his body, comes up to Eddie and Odetta. He has already sensed that Odetta has two identities in one body. When he entered the doorway with her, he felt her shift. Roland felt a strange sensation pass through her, something she hadn’t felt before. He can’t yet explain it. Bewildered, Odetta breaks down. Eddie hugs her to console her, noticing Roland’s aloofness with the lady. He calls Roland “nothing but a goddamn machine” (259). Roland reflects that he wants to feel emotion, but his training is that to reach the Dark Tower, he can’t be distracted by love or pity. This is why (in The Gunslinger) he let Jake go to his death, even though he considered Jake his child.

Eddie explains the doorway and the beach to Odetta, but Roland is wary of her and keeps his distance since he knows of Detta’s existence. Odetta and Eddie become friends as they and Roland search for the third door. Eddie tells Odetta about his past and his drug use, while she tells him about racial discrimination in her timeline as well as her past. She tells Eddie that someone dropped a brick on her head when she was a child while she waited on the sidewalk because a white taxi driver had refused to drive her and her parents. When she recounts her terrible time in Oxford, Mississippi, Eddie recalls that as children, he and Henry used to listen to a song called “Oxford Town” by Bob Dylan, the opening lines of which are “Two men killed by the light of the moon, / Somebody better investigate soon” (268), referring to lynchings of Black people in the state. When Eddie refers to Odetta as Black, she’s surprised. Eddie explains that this is how Black Americans choose to identify in his time. Despite Odetta’s request not to refer to her as such, Eddie pushes on.

When Odetta tells Eddie about losing chunks of time, he asks her to examine the question logically. Odetta believes that someone clubbed her in Oxford, which is why she lost consciousness and woke up on the beach. Eddie refutes this conclusion since Odetta remembers coming back from Oxford. Odetta grows agitated and rubs her temples. Meanwhile, Roland pulls Eddie aside and tells him not to trust Odetta since she’s not the same person whose mind he entered in Macy’s. Although Roland can see that Eddie is falling in love with the pretty and intelligent Odetta, Eddie can’t let down his guard.

Roland knows that Eddie, in the first flush of love, will ignore his advice. He therefore stays up at night, watching Odetta. The night after Eddie argues with Odetta, Detta awakens and comes to Eddie, retrieves the gun next to him, and points it as his temple. She pulls the trigger, but the gun doesn’t fire because Roland loaded it with spent casings. Roland recognizes Detta as a born gunslinger despite her disability. He still doesn’t intervene between Detta and the sleeping Eddie, as he wants Eddie to learn his own lessons, just like Roland did under the training of the gunslinger Cort, his mentor. As Detta screams in anger at the misfiring gun, Eddie finally wakes up. Roland yells at Eddie to get his gun belt so that they can tie Detta’s hands.

In Detta’s head, the events of coming into Mid-World play out differently. She believes that Roland and Eddie hit her and called her ugly racist and sexist epithets. She recalls that they fed her meat from venomous monsters (the lobstrosities). As the men tie her up, her worst suspicions are confirmed. Detta yells cuss words like “greymeat” at Roland and Eddie (295). Eddie feels that Detta talks like a caricature of a Black person from the South, as if from a bad movie. Privately, he tells Roland that Detta is pretending at something, even if she doesn’t know it. Her accent and behavior are an act.

Eddie also tells Roland that Detta is “schizophrenic,” a condition in which the mind is divided. Eddie adds that he experienced something similar in the split second when Roland brought him into Mid-World through the doorway. At that moment, Eddie felt that he was looking at himself, as if in a mirror. Roland realizes the strange sensation Odetta and Detta felt when he crossed the doorway with them. They saw each other, but unlike Eddie, who saw his mirror image, the two women saw their reflections as the other’s identity. Odetta and Detta now know of each other’s existence, even though they have yet to realize it.

Detta’s behavior degenerates as the men pull her wheelchair behind them on the beach, so much so that Eddie feels like throttling her. She refuses to eat the meals Eddie cooks because she thinks he and Roland are trying to poison her. Meanwhile, Roland notices that his infection and fever are returning now that he’s out of antibiotics. They must find the third door soon. A couple of days pass, and then Eddie begins to notice hills in the distance, signaling an end to the beach. Roland is growing increasingly sick. Hungry and exhausted, Detta faints, and Odetta returns. Just then, Roland’s legs buckle, and he crashes into the sand.